So when I heard recently that one of our clients was using Agile techniques to increase innovation in their marketing and business development department, I immediately scheduled an interview with Brenda Plowman, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Fasken Martineau, an international business law and litigation firm with more than 700 lawyers.

The Fasken Martineau marketing and business development department includes people operating from eight offices, six in Canada, one in the UK, and one in South Africa. Plowman has worked in the department for more than 10 years. When she was promoted to the CMO position in July 2015, she noted that:

Over my history here I’d seen many underutilized talents with the potential to help us transform and offer better services to our lawyers. I wanted to reinvent our group. But how could I get people to change when I was coming to work at the same place and with the same people I’ve known for a long time?

We did a survey of the marketing and business development team because we wanted to see what they were thinking. One of the responses was, "The firm doesn’t ask us to innovate enough. It doesn’t expect us to be creative." People didn’t feel that they could bring their ideas forward and they felt that, frankly, they weren’t expected to bring their best game.

Plowman decided to start by adapting two Agile-related concepts: hackathons to creatively generate ideas for improvement and scrum to deliver them and “make sure we were actually accomplishing what we had set out to do.”

Hackathons originated in the software development world and consist of intense meetings in which groups of programmers and others collaborate intensively to solve a particular problem. With the help of a consultant, Plowman adapted the hackathon concept to legal marketing, and in June of 2016 they held their first three-hour hackathon with the team (two sessions with multiple locations involved in each) aimed at coming up with creative ideas to improve marketing efficiency and results on a specific topic. Candidly she admitted that:

At first people were saying, "I don’t know why I’m here." But when a second session was held in October, there was much more engagement and people began to focus on, "How can we go faster and get more done in the limited time we have?”

They created a list of key areas “in which we wanted to improve what we had been providing previously and increase the value we were delivering to lawyers.”

One of the unique aspects of these hackathons is that they were led by the Manager group. Historically, real opportunities for leadership and development were only handled by the Senior Marketing Team (the Director level). That team was committed to developing their Managers and creating opportunity for their growth and development. The Managers were empowered and did a great job working with the teams and bringing the recommendations forward to the Senior Marketing Team (SMT). This aspect is key in Plowman’s vision to leverage the talent on her team.

In addition, the marketing and business development team has started a significant transformation with many changes in place. The Directors have taken on pieces of this transformation and are leading this change with Plowman. There are a lot of moving parts and demands on the team. This led Plowman to adapt another Agile software development technique: scrum. Initially she provided the Directors (the SMT) a copy of the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time as part of the “book club” for this group. After the SMT read it and met on it during an in-person meeting, they then expanded to the Managers as a part of their development and a way to encourage them to innovate and drive their project forward. (This book is an excellent resource for law firms and I will write a separate blog soon describing its key concepts.)

This has now evolved into a 30-minute weekly telecon held every Monday by this group to discuss four substantial projects and several other key initiatives that the team is working on (including digital transformation and social media), in which Fasken’s marketing and business development department is concentrating its efforts to become best-in-class:

The group is using some of the techniques from the scrum book to establish and measure specific goals for the next 30, 60, and 90 days. The Monday meetings are organized around three key questions familiar to anyone who has ever been involved with scrum:

What did we accomplish last week?

What is planned for this week?

Are there any obstacles to progress?

One result of the Monday meetings is that, “People collaborate to identify obstacles. It’s also been really helpful for me as the leader of the group because I learn how I can expedite what needs to get done this week.”

This initiative is very much a work-in-progress, but participants in the weekly meetings have already produced results. “Scrum has helped us to go faster, do more, and get obstacles out of our way. It’s increased transparency, which drives efficiency and effectiveness. And it’s created cultural change within our team. The learning is coming faster and faster.”

Plowman and her team would like to expand the program in the coming year to include lawyers. She predicts that the next steps will be even more exciting “when we get to working with our lawyers and going through the process together with them.”